Change of Format Starting October 2009

Breakthroughs Today will change its format from a simple blog into a review blog which incorporates the latest in physical and mental sciences for our readers to react with and share their views. Starting October 7, this will be so.

Being a reviewer, it will discuss certain issues brought up in the Breakthroughs articles published in Sun.Star Cebu. However, our content will not limit to that printed updates. Thereafter this blog will be reviewing also recent breakthroughs found in the news even if it has not been covered in the regular Breakthroughs column.

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The "Lungs" of Our Homes

As trees slowly disappear with growing urbanization, the Rooseveltian lungs are replaced with more dangerous electrical lungs at home, many of which can damage the genetic materials of the human lungs. FRANKLIN Roosevelt said: “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” In Cebu today, however, people may have given up “fresh strength” for the material conveniences of an urbanized province. Even the more far-flung towns in the province of Cebu have already shown signs of urbanization. And it will not be long when even forests will cease to be. Nonetheless, the “lungs” have been replaced with electric air fresheners, with all the varied approaches to freshen the air—at least in the cities and the suburbs. But four Japanese researchers—three from the Iwate University (Ueda, Morioka, Iwate) Department of Veterinary Medicine and one from the National Institute of Health Services (K...

Dealing with TURP

As we age, a lot of things we easily can do when we were younger get harder to do as our bodily systems start to show problems in functioning. That's the case with TURP; and if you add the inevitable side effects of drugs used in treating it, you can only imaging how difficult old age can be. A CERTAIN practice has been common in synthetic drug treatments (so common it may be considered a cliché). You start taking a prescription for one health problem and you end up having a new one. Of course that is not true for all synthetic medications. But given lack of long-term studies in most pharmaceutical drugs today, who knows what’s going to happen in the next 20 to 30 years after taking a particular regimen. In history, many drugs have been pulled out from shelves because they later turned out to be potential killers, if not already one. The classic case is that of finasteride, a treatment used against certain complications that transurethral ...

Deadly X-Gene Mutants

A RECENT study on macrophages (i.e. defensive cells in our body that engulf threatening substances inside our body) introduced me to a lethal, genetic disease that targets the male population. This disease is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), named after the French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne, who described it in 1861. While it has an incidence of one in 3,500 newborn males, health experts consider this as the most common lethal disease of childhood around the world. Mutation in the male (X) chromosome [dystrophin gene, locus Xp21] causes a rapid degeneration of the muscles, leading into an eventual loss of walking ability and then death. While females do not exhibit symptoms, they can be carriers of these defective genes, especially if the father had this condition or the mother is also a carrier. Symptoms usually appear before age five; at times visible in early infancy. These symptoms involve... ( Read more .) This article appears in Sun-Star Ce...

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